arch: Introduce post-init read-only memory

One of the easiest ways to protect the kernel from attack is to reduce
the internal attack surface exposed when a "write" flaw is available. By
making as much of the kernel read-only as possible, we reduce the
attack surface.

Many things are written to only during __init, and never changed
again. These cannot be made "const" since the compiler will do the wrong
thing (we do actually need to write to them). Instead, move these items
into a memory region that will be made read-only during mark_rodata_ro()
which happens after all kernel __init code has finished.

This introduces __ro_after_init as a way to mark such memory, and adds
some documentation about the existing __read_mostly marking.

This improves the security of the Linux kernel by marking formerly
read-write memory regions as read-only on a fully booted up system.

Based on work by PaX Team and Brad Spengler.

Signed-off-by: Kees Cook <[email protected]>
Cc: Andy Lutomirski <[email protected]>
Cc: Arnd Bergmann <[email protected]>
Cc: Borislav Petkov <[email protected]>
Cc: Brad Spengler <[email protected]>
Cc: Brian Gerst <[email protected]>
Cc: David Brown <[email protected]>
Cc: Denys Vlasenko <[email protected]>
Cc: Emese Revfy <[email protected]>
Cc: H. Peter Anvin <[email protected]>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>
Cc: Mathias Krause <[email protected]>
Cc: Michael Ellerman <[email protected]>
Cc: PaX Team <[email protected]>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <[email protected]>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
Cc: linux-arch <[email protected]>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/[email protected]
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <[email protected]>

1 files changed, 14 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/cache.h b/include/linux/cache.h
index 17e7e82d2aa7..1be04f8c563a 100644
--- a/include/linux/cache.h
+++ b/include/linux/cache.h
@@ -12,10 +12,24 @@
 #define SMP_CACHE_BYTES L1_CACHE_BYTES
 #endif
 
+/*
+ * __read_mostly is used to keep rarely changing variables out of frequently
+ * updated cachelines. If an architecture doesn't support it, ignore the
+ * hint.
+ */
 #ifndef __read_mostly
 #define __read_mostly
 #endif
 
+/*
+ * __ro_after_init is used to mark things that are read-only after init (i.e.
+ * after mark_rodata_ro() has been called). These are effectively read-only,
+ * but may get written to during init, so can't live in .rodata (via "const").
+ */
+#ifndef __ro_after_init
+#define __ro_after_init __attribute__((__section__(".data..ro_after_init")))
+#endif
+
 #ifndef ____cacheline_aligned
 #define ____cacheline_aligned __attribute__((__aligned__(SMP_CACHE_BYTES)))
 #endif